Generational Effects
Our efforts thus far to localize the sources of civic disengagement
have been singularly unfruitful. The downtrends are uniform across the major categories of American soci- ety-among men and among wom- en; in central cities, in suburbs, and in small towns; among the wealthy, the poor, and the middle class; among blacks, whites, and other ethnic groups; in the North, in the South, on both coasts and in the heartland. One notable excep- tion to this uniformity, however, involves age. In all our statistical analyses, age is second only to ed- ucation as a predictor of all forms of civic engagement and trust. Older people belong to more orga- nizations than young people, and they are less misanthropic. Older Americans also vote more often and read newspapers more fre- quently, two other forms of civic engagement closely correlated with joining and trusting. Figure 4 shows the basic pat- tern-civic involvement appears to rise more or less steadily from
early adulthood toward a plateau in middle age, from which it declines only late in life. This humpback pattern, familiar from many analy- ses of social participation, including time-budget studies (Robinson and Godbey 1995), seems naturally to represent the arc of life's engage- ments. Most observers have inter- preted this pattern as a life cycle phenomenon, and so, at first, did I. Evidence from the General So- cial Survey (GSS) enables us to follow individual cohorts as they age. If the rising lines in Figure 4 represent deepening civic engage- ment with age, then we should be able to track this same deepening engagement as we follow, for ex- ample, the first of the baby boomers-born in 1947-as they aged from 25 in 1972 (the first year of the GSS) to 47 in 1994 (the latest year available). Startlingly, how- ever, such an analysis, repeated for successive birth cohorts, produces virtually no evidence of such life